Tales of Belkin, and: The Tales of Belkin, and: Alexander Pushkin’s “The Tales of Belkin”: Formalist and Structuralist Readings and Beyond the Literary Theories (review)

The new translations of The Tales of Belkin by Josh Billings and Hugh Aplin begin with errors in “A.P.’s” “From the Publisher.” Billings confuses the housekeeper-godmother with the village elder, apparently mistaking the Russian word starosta (village elder) for starukha (old lady), and is thus obliged to substitute the feminine pronoun for the masculine in the following passage, creating the first female estate steward on record (italics mine):

I demanded the estate books, denounced the old woman as a cheat… Just as my searching and strident questioning of the cheating old steward was driving her to the edge of embarrassment and forcing her to silence…”

(18)

He does, however, translate kuma as “godmother” (16) in the description of this same woman-into-steward, better than Aplin’s “gossip” (4); on the other hand, Aplin renders pluta-starosta more or less accurately as “rogue of a headman” (5). Both might have consulted Alan Myers (World Classics, 2009)—“rogue of an elder” (5)—and Ronald Wilks (Penguin, 1998)—“roguish elder” (5)—for accuracy. In “The Shot,” Billings translates Baratynskii’s “Strelialis´ my” as “we shot” (21), while Aplin has the more accurate “We exchanged shots” (7), better than Wilks’s “And so we fought a duel” (7) but not than Myers’s “We exchanged fire” (7). In Billings, zlobnaia mysl´ becomes plural “vengeful thoughts” (29), while Aplin has the better “a malicious thought” (12). The Melville House edition calls Belkin a “scholar” on the cover, which does not inspire confidence. Of the two, Aplin’s translation is more accurate and retains more of the humor carried by the styles of the speakers that is key in the Tales; that edition contains “A History of the Village of Goryukhino” as well as a two-and-a-half-page fragment of Pushkin’s on being a poet. But neither Billings nor Aplin has surpassed the existing translations.

Sang Hyun Kim’s study of the Tales of Belkin is designed to provide a theoretical analysis of the tales as a cycle, to get at their “organic unity” (xv). He begins by asking why Pushkin moved the last two stories he wrote to the beginning of the cycle when he published the Tales in 1831, and suggests that “Pushkin persuaded [sic] a number of closely intertwined aesthetic purposes” in so doing; “the texts are created elaborately to achieve his own goal of rebuking the contemporary Sentimental and Romantic clichés by means of irony, parody and mask” (xv). Citing Sergei Bocharov’s 1974 study of Pushkin’s self-conscious transition from poetry to prose, Kim describes this development as the “macro-plot,” finding in the epigraph to the first story, “The Shot,” Pushkin’s “literary shot at his literary opponents” (141), and in the story’s plot a metaphorical destruction of Byronic clichés in the death of Silvio, while in the last tale, “Mistress into Maid,” Pushkin depicts a genuinely Russian, young hero Aleksei who will have a successful marriage (137), so that the story “symbolically prefigures a new start, a married life, not only creating a new form of artistic text, but also interweaving his own real life story with virtual characters” (138). According to Kim, Pushkin’s understanding of svadebnyi byt and literary materials converge to render the theme of the verge between life and death, a theme which dictates the cycle’s structure: the first two stories contain the deaths of Silvio and Burmin, while there are no...